Given the chance, education plays a powerful role in alleviating poverty. Steve Packer reports.

Poverty is a simple concept with complex real-life implications. Even when dealing with it in the context of education, it's hard to know where to start. There's the micro and the macro-although it's inappropriate to consider anything as 'small' when it can profoundly change the lives of people on the receiving end.

We could begin with the kids at Alphington Primary School in Melbourne who sell hot chocolate in winter and fruit icy poles in summer to raise the $43 a month they need to sponsor a 7-year-old boy in rural Mongolia through World Vision. Or with the students at Darwin High School who made posters to promote their awareness-raising activities during Anti-Poverty Week in October.

Or we could turn to the extensive section on education in the recent Australian Council of So-cial Service report Australia Fair: International Comparisons 2007, which concludes with this startling statement: "Good quality, universal education can be a route out of disadvantage-rewarding talent and providing greater life chances to children on low incomes or from disadvan-taged backgrounds."

In relation to literacy, the upcoming OECD report on adult literacy levels in Australia is ex-pected to highlight that no progress has been made over the last decade. Trends such as the in-creasing relative gap between overall resources available for private and public schools, the ris-ing costs of higher education and training to individuals and relatively low levels of support for further education are likely to increase the relationship between privilege and education.

The ACOSS report revealed that the number of Australians living in poverty increased be-tween 1994 and 2004. Using an international indicator of 50 per cent of median income, the number increased from 7.6 to 9.9 per cent of the population, or nearly two million Australians. The United Kingdom and Ireland's poverty line is 60 per cent of median income. If this indicator is applied, the Australian increase was from 17.1 to 19.8 per cent, or 3.8 million Australians.

On the UN Human Poverty Index, Australia ranked 14th out of 18 OECD countries, behind most of Western Europe.

"The ACOSS report is particularly damning," says AEU federal president Pat Byrne, "be-cause it comes at a time when we've never been wealthier. The Howard government seemed to think the best way to hand back money was through tax refunds rather than support to alleviate poverty. Such policies exacerbate the difference rather than narrowing the gap between the com-fortably well-off and the seriously disadvantaged."

Vicious circle

The ACOSS report highlights the intergenerational nature, or 'vicious circle', of poverty in the community and recognises education as a "key essential in providing Australians with a fair go".

"Increasing education rates has been proven to lead to higher rates of employment, higher wages, lower reliance on welfare, better health, increased likelihood of home ownership and lower levels of social ills such as violence, suicide and depression," the report says. "Education also helps combat intergenerational disadvantage. For example, 62 per cent of Indigenous students whose parents or guardians had 13 or more years of education were rated by their teachers at average or above average academic performance. As the parents' number of years of education declined, so too did the proportion of Indigenous students with av-erage or above-average academic performance." If the parents had not attended school, the figure was 25 per cent.

"In Australia, 70 per cent of the variation in test results can be accounted for in terms of in-come and the background of students. Students going to schools in disadvantaged areas are more likely to have lower test results."

The report cites Canada, Denmark and Ireland as nations that have successfully used their education systems "as mechanisms to raise the living standards of children from lower socioeco-nomic backgrounds and so achieve a fairer start to their adult lives".

It is also more difficult to staff schools in areas of poverty, says Byrne. "Teachers, especially inexperienced ones, find it much harder to teach there than they imagined and they don't stay. Staff turnover makes it difficult for the schools to turn around their results."

At the same time, the Education Department seems to "misunderstand" the cycle. "The schools aren't given the well-considered, properly resourced focus they need to make sure those positions are attractive-not 'Oh dear, you got the bad draw'. It's the same with providing adequate housing for teachers in country areas, and specialised support such as remedial pro-grams and additional teachers.

The recent report Dropping Off the Edge, commissioned by Catholic Services Australia and the Jesuit Social Service, also reveals that thousands of Australians are locked in deep social dis-advantage. "Education is not destiny," says its author, professor Tony Vinson, "but our findings show an unmistakable pattern associated with inadequate education and training-unemployment, low income, poor health and 'making ends meet' by criminal means resulting in high rates of convictions and imprisonment. Where these characteristics are concentrated there, too, we find high levels of confirmed child maltreatment."